Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Cross Colours: Black Fashion In The 20th Century

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at California African American Museum, Los Angeles (through March 1, 2020)
Reviewed by Seren Sensei

Everything old is new again. This motto has held steady for years in the world of fashion, with it’s here-today-gone-tomorrow trends, and nowhere has it rung more true than in the waves of 1990’s urban culture that are currently enjoying a huge resurgence on runways. As numerous high fashion and luxury brands clamor into the billion dollar market for streetwear, Cross Colours: Black Fashion in the 20th Century, showing at the California African American Museum (CAAM), is a fresh and dynamic exhibit examining the history of the recently rebooted Cross Colours: a Black-owned brand that was one of the first to cater exclusively to a young, Black, and ‘urban,’ i.e. inner-city, customer who predominantly wore streetwear. A testament to its culture-shifting perspective, the retrospective opens with the story of how the line came to be, and then moves through its brand history and significance in time as viewers explore the gallery. [Read more…]

Humor and Horror: A Tale of Two Satirists

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IndigNATION: Political Drawings by Jim Carrey, 2016-2018, Maccarone, Los Angeles (through December 1, 2018)                                                             
Robbie Conal: Cabinet of Horrors, Track 16, Los Angeles (through December 10, 2018)           
Reviewed By Lorraine Heitzman

There are two political shows capturing the attention of Angelenos now, besides, of course, the very real drama playing out in Washington. IndigNATION: Political Drawings by Jim Carrey at the Maccarone Gallery is a series of political cartoons as freewheeling and expressive as Carrey himself, while Robbie Conal: Cabinet of Horrors at Track 16 continues the artist’s well-known practice of skewering those in power in brutal, satiric portraits. Both shows are entertaining and provocative in their use of humor to depict harsh realities. Like Edel Rodriguez, whose graphic and clever depictions of Trump have attained an international following, and the innumerable artists who feel compelled to express their political views, Carrey and Conal are calling attention to what they see as the hypocrisies stemming from the current administration. If art has become the new, preferred method of political persuasion, bring it on. [Read more…]

Gathered Crumbs From A Lost Cake

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A Review of Elizabeth Ellen’s Person/a
by John Biscello

I

In the 2004 film, The Libertine, Johnny Depp, playing the Earl of Rochester, delivers an acidic opening monologue, which begins, “Allow me to be frank at the commencement, you will not like me. The gentlemen will be envious and the ladies will be repelled. You will not like me now and you will like me a good deal less as you go on.”

The ego, as a mouthpiece for rebellion, as an exiled priest dispatching its sermon-of-self from a rogue pulpit, creates itself through voice. In the “Letter from the Editor” section of Elizabeth Ellen’s new novel, Person/a, the author states: “… I write this letter to you, dear reader, as both editor and author of this novel, with full awareness and with full admission that if there is a ‘Monster at the End of this Book,’ that monster is I. I am that monster. Let this then serve as an introduction.” [Read more…]

Savage And Lovely: The Bad Batch

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Reviewed by C von Hassett

The Bad Batch (2016) is a stark and stunning new film by Ana Lily Amirpour. And timely too, considering every effort by our current regime to cast those of seeming naught into the desperate oblivions of a world only slightly less unhinged than the one depicted in this film. With a nod to the current depravity of our day, the film opens (forgive my indulgence) in the wet dream of said regime whose spooging head is our ever-ranting, ever-pissy Child-in-Chief — let’s call him Boy — he who nightly wets his bed and in the dreamy slosh fingers blindly for his own plundered asshole. Were the Boy blessedly in this film, he’d be swiftly on a sizzling spit: fatted swine for its flesh-hungry natives. 

We first meet our protagonist, a wordless Arlen May Johnson, aka Inmate 5040, as guards walk her to desert’s edge, to the kingdom’s unceremonial gate (American chain link), to literally lock her away from fair society. She stands, indifferent to her plight, with only a backpack, a burger (which she promptly eats) and a half-filled jug of water. Ignored is the wooded post which reads: 

Warning: Beyond this fence is no longer the territory of Texas. That hereafter no person within the territory beyond this fence is a resident of the United States of America or shall be acknowledged, recognized or governed by the laws and governing bodies therein. Good luck. 

There, she is loosed into a blistering landscape of sand and sunbaked clay, and she walks straight in as would a schoolgirl through a noonday park, though there is little question here of her arrival into something far more suspect. Arlen’s first encounter is with a tribe of desert body builders — a brutish, body-ripped band in need, naturally, of good supply of protein. Stray travelers seem their sole course, and these luckless lie chained and limbless in what unremittingly comes as another feed, one body part at a time. Arlen, freshly snatched from the feral barrens, no sooner meets with a hacksaw than she wiles a witting escape, and face-up to the blazing sun, a snapped up skateboard as her ride, she pushes into a fevered dream one foot, and only one foot, at a time. What follows is a love story.

[Read more…]

The Bad Batch

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CINEMA DISORDINAIRE

Reviewed by C von Hassett

The Bad Batch (2016) is a stark and stunning new film by Ana Lily Amirpour. And timely too, considering every effort by our current regime to cast those of seeming naught into the desperate oblivions of a world only slightly less unhinged than the one depicted in this film. With a nod to the current depravity of our day, the film opens (forgive my indulgence) in the wet dream of said regime whose spooging head is our ever-ranting, ever-pissy Child-in-Chief — let’s call him Boy — he who nightly wets his bed and in the dreamy slosh fingers blindly for his own plundered asshole. Were the Boy blessedly in this film, he’d be swiftly on a sizzling spit: fatted swine for its flesh-hungry natives.  [Read more…]